30 years after the Rev. Jim Jones led more than 900 people to suicide and murder, the horror lives on for survivors

TIM REITERMAN, Associated Press |
November 16, 2008

The Rev. Jim Jones and his temple began in Indianapolis in the 1950s. They moved to California, then to South America. His life and those of hundreds of followers ended in Guyana.

Dark clouds tumbled overhead on that afternoon 30 years ago, in the last hours of the congressman's mission deep in the jungle of Guyana.

With a small entourage, Rep. Leo Ryan had come to investigate the remote agricultural settlement built by a California-based church. But while he was there, more than a dozen people had stepped forward: We want to return to the United States, they said, fearfully.

Suddenly a powerful wind tore through the central pavilion, riffling pages of my notebook, and the skies dumped torrents. People scrambled for cover as I interviewed the founder of Peoples Temple.

"I feel sorry that we are being destroyed from within," said the Rev. Jim Jones, stunned that members wanted to abandon the place he called the Promised Land.

That freakish storm and the mood seemed ominous — and not just to me. "I felt evil itself blow into Jonestown when that storm hit," said Tim Carter, one of the few settlers to survive that day.

Within hours, Carter would see his wife and son die of cyanide poisoning, two of the more than 900 people Jones led in a murder and suicide ritual of epic proportions.

I would be wounded when a team of temple assassins killed Ryan — the first congressman slain in the line of duty — and four others, including three newsmen.

But by their wiles or happenstance, scores of temple members escaped the events of Nov. 18, 1978. Some would commit suicide, die at the hands of others or fall victim to drugs. But many more moved on to new careers, spouses and churches. They are, as they were before joining the temple, mostly ordinary people who wanted to help their fellow man and be part of something larger than themselves.

With time, differences between temple outsiders and insiders, temple defectors, and loyalists have faded. They have experiences in common and share painful memories from a tragedy that has come to epitomize the power of a charismatic leader over his followers.

Carter was spared to carry out one last mission for the temple. Almost 30 years after that horrible day, we spoke for the first time.

"We are inextricably linked," Carter said. "What you experienced at the airstrip is what I experienced at Jonestown. ... I cannot describe the agony, terror and horror of what that was."

Peoples Temple sprang from the heartland in the 1950s. Jones built an interracial congregation in Indianapolis. Moving his flock to California, the minister transformed his church into a leftist social movement with programs for the poor. He was head of San Francisco's public housing commission when media scrutiny and legal problems spurred his retreat to Jonestown for what would be his last stand.

Yulanda Williams was about 12 when she began attending temple services in San Francisco with her parents. Her father believed that the minister helped him recover from a heart attack.

In 1977, as news media were beginning to investigate disciplinary thrashings and other abuse in the temple, Jones summoned Williams and her husband to Guyana.

Upon arrival in Jonestown, the couple felt deceived. It was far from the paradise Jones described. People were packed into metal-roofed cabins, sleeping on bunks without mattresses and using outhouses with newsprint for toilet paper. There were armed guards, and Jones warned that deserters would encounter venomous snakes and hostile natives.

The preacher, who once charmed U.S. politicians and met with future first lady Rosalynn Carter, had turned into a pill-popping dictator who presided over harsh discipline.

Because her husband was an attorney whose skills could be better used elsewhere, they were permitted to leave. Months before the horrific end, Williams and her family cut ties with the temple.

Eventually, Williams joined the San Francisco Police Department. Fearing for her job, she kept her temple history secret for a decade. But later she confided in a superior and was given a job working with gang members. "I told my story to young people," she said. "They were amazed because they never imagined anyone could beat these types of odds."

On the morning of Nov. 18, Ryan's party was about to tour the settlement, and investigate whether its inhabitants truly were free to go.

Leslie Wilson, wife of security chief Joe Wilson, took her 3-year-old son, Jakari, to the kitchen building where they met seven others who had endured enough of Jonestown's Spartan life and Jones' faked sieges and suicide rehearsals. The group told fellow settlers they were going on a picnic — but they just kept on moving through the jungle.

"I was so scared I was shaking in my tennis shoes," Leslie Wilson said. "I was waiting for a gunshot and a bullet and me dropping."

Trudging 35 miles along railroad tracks, they arrived that night in the town of Matthews Ridge. Leslie Wilson, who lost her mother, brother, sister and husband that Saturday, would be consumed with survivor's guilt.

On Mother's Day, two years after Jonestown, she thought about what it must have been like for her mother to see two of her children die. She put a pistol to her head.

She had to live, she decided, for the sake of her son.

She twice married and bore two more children. Now divorced, she goes by her married name Leslie Cathey and works in the health care industry.

She finally has found forgiveness, even for Jones, but she cannot forget. "I pray my family did not think I left them," she said. "Not a day goes by that I don't think about it."

While a temple dump truck ferried the Ryan party and 15 grim-faced defectors toward the Port Kaituma airstrip six miles away, we were unaware that anyone had escaped.

We made it safely to the dirt strip. But then, a tractor with a trailer full of temple gunmen — Joe Wilson among them — soon bore down on us. Gunfire exploded as we boarded two small planes.

Some survivors fled into the jungle, but most took refuge in a cramped rum shop, fearful the assassins would return. "You're gonna see the worst carnage of your life at Jonestown," said one of the defectors the next morning. "It's called 'revolutionary suicide.' "

By the time the airstrip gunmen returned to Jonestown, Jones had gathered his people in the pavilion and had begun preparing them for the end. He used news of Ryan's shooting to convince the throng that they had no hope, no future, no place to go.

"The congressman has been murdered," he announced. "Please get the medication before it's too late. ... Don't be afraid to die."

When potassium cyanide-laced Grape Flavor Aid was brought forward, Jones wanted the children to go first, sealing everyone's fate because the parents and elders would have no reason to live. With armed guards encircling everyone and with youngsters bawling, medical staff members with syringes squirted poison down the throats of babies.

The killing was under way when Carter was sent to the pavilion. Frozen in horror, he saw his 15-month-old son, Malcolm, poisoned. Then his wife, Gloria, died in his arms. "I wanted to kill myself," he said. "But I had a voice saying, 'You cannot die. You must live.' "

He did live. Jones had one last mission for the Vietnam veteran.

A top Jones aide gave Carter, his brother and another temple member pistols and luggage containing hundreds of thousands of dollars. They were instructed to take the money to the Soviet Embassy in Georgetown along with letters authorizing transfer of millions from temple bank accounts to that government.

The trio ditched most of the cash during the arduous hike to Port Kaituma, and they were detained by police there.

In the aftermath, Carter went to live with his father in Boise, Idaho. He got a job at a travel agency and worked in the industry for years. He has had two long-term relationships and is the father of three children. He collects disability payments for post-traumatic stress from Vietnam, but he reflects on the nightmare of Jonestown each day.

"The more time that goes on, the better it is," he said. "I can think about Gloria and Malcolm without feeling that knife in my chest."

Thirty years later, dozens of surviving members come together for private reunions. "I go because I feel so strongly about the need for and power of forgiveness and understanding," said Stephan Jones, the minister's son. He was 19, and in Georgetown with other basketball team members on the temple's last day.

Today, he is the father of three daughters and is the vice president of a small Bay Area office installation company.

In Jonestown's aftermath, Stephan Jones hated his father. But he has come to recognize that the capacity for good and evil, and mental sickness, coexisted in Jim Jones.

"We don't want to face our own responsibility or part in what happened and feel ashamed for being duped or manipulated," he said. "We look for someone else to blame. I realized over time that there was a great need to forgive him, then I could forgive myself."

Tim Reiterman, San Francisco news editor for The Associated Press, covered Jonestown for the San Francisco Examiner.